INSECT VARIETY. 173 



times when walking over the g-round only " ssssin " is heard. 

 Dr. Fischer finds it common in parts of Germany in the fields 

 and meadows, where the clear stridor of the male may be 

 perceived at some paces. It is caused, he says, by the hind legs 

 being drawn upwards, and then from five to six times briskly 

 rubbed on the wing-covers ; and although different rhythms 

 sometimes arise during the upward movement, the music is 

 commonly " Rtsch-ssssss ! rtsch-ssssss ! " — a Hebraic concate- 

 nation of consonants an Englishman may interpret or translate, 

 I presume, '' Ritisch-sisisisisis ! " Grasshopper language inclines 

 to the penetrating i or sorrowful e. But then, why on com- 

 paring the two notations are the sounds reversed in either case ? 

 We can hardly suppose the dwellers in the Alpine fastnesses, and 

 along the banks of the arrowy Rhone to have so accommodated 

 themselves to the neighbourhood of Fribourg and the Rosskopf 

 mountain. Herr Graber gives the teeth on the femur of this spe- 

 cies as one hundred and forty, and attributes the loudness of their 

 music in Austria to their number and wideness of interspacing. 



The Variable Grasshopper {Stenobothrus variabilis), Fieber 

 is one of the commonest and most distributed of European 

 kinds, as well as the most changeable. Generally it is grey, 

 fuscous, reddish, or of a dull, greenish hue above, with the 

 elytra covered often with black speckles. The extremity of 

 the abdomen is not rarely lacquered red, especially in the male. 

 The varieties, too, occur on the same spot, and couple, as far 

 as I can learn, indiscriminately, the negro with the brown, and 

 green with the fuscous, a fact perhaps owing to the fine ears 

 of grasshoppers, and a likeness in specific music. October 

 ushers in their season of reproduction, and at this period the 

 morose males, lit by the chill sunshine of the waning year, 

 collect on dry banks, often in numbers, and form groups round 

 their apathetic and coy females, nestling to bask on the bare 

 patches of the warmth-retaining soil ; or they depend around 

 like a forbidding fruit on low shrubs in the vicinity, a seat of 

 vantage derived from a power of agile flight. Inspired by 

 their ardours arises their seething stridor in fierce unison, now 

 dragging as the salt waves when heard receding along an un- 

 frequented shore, and now presenting the illusion of a bubbling 

 source, or the harmonious warbling of nightingales. Fitfully 



